Best known as an expert on Egon Schiele and Viennese and German art and music, this scholar/professor/curator/author with an Italian last name was born in Minnesota, and grew up in Barcelona, Milan, and Texas. Since her 2005 retirement from Southern Methodist University in Dallas—with which she is still affiliated as a Distinguished Professor Emerita of Art History—she has written twelve mystery novels based on a mixture of real and imagined lives of artists and composers.
Comini’s books and lectures on Schiele, Klimt, Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, Kollwitz, and many others have long been required reading for scholars. Among her many accolades, she was voted outstanding professor sixteen times by her students, and she served as the first woman scholar to hold a Charles John Gwinn and Alfred Hodder fellowship (now the Hodder Fellowship) at Princeton University (1972–1973). She was also named Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at Oxford University’s European Humanities Research Centre (1996), and was awarded the Grand Decoration of Honor for Services to the Republic of Austria in recognition of her contributions to Germanic culture. Comini has traveled and lectured throughout the world.
Alessandra Comini is also my personal hero. And, to quote a remark she made in an interview about her book on the changing image of Beethoven, “Beethoven is a hero, and everyone needs a hero.”
Book cover, Alessandra Comini, The Changing Image of Beethoven: A study in Mythmaking. Sunstone Press, 1987.
Indeed, Alessandra Comini is thrice a hero to me: her interdisciplinary approach to art, music, and literary history inspired me as a young graduate student in her class; her brilliant, original, and highly entertaining lectures influenced me throughout my own nearly 45 years as a professor at Juilliard; and her unremitting productivity continues to motivate me now that I have retired from teaching.
During the late 1960s and early ‘70s, when female students dominated the art history graduate department at Columbia, nearly all the professors were male. These male professors were addressed as Professor or Doctor. Professor Alessandra Comini, on the other hand, was referred to as Miss Comini—despite her doctorate. Perhaps that explains why she shows such delight in her detective and alter ego in the twelve novels she has written being addressed as “Professor Doktor Megan Crespi.”
As a lifelong feminist, Comini constantly searched for and included the study of women artists in all her courses. She was also one of the founders of the Women’s Caucus for Art and the National Museum for Women in the Arts
The indispensable monograph, Egon Schiele’s Portraits (originally published in 1974), launched Comini’s career. When, as a doctoral student at Columbia, she began intensive research into Schiele, the artist was little known. Comini traveled to Austria in search of records of his short and troubled life there, actually finding and visiting the cell where he had been imprisoned. Decades later, the Neue Galerie in New York City commissioned her to curate their blockbuster exhibition Egon Schiele’s Portraits (2014–15).
Book Cover, Alessandra Comini, Egon Schiele’s Portraits. New Edition Paperback. Sunstone Press, 2014
She went on to write still more about Schiele—and in 2015, Comini wrote a fictionalized account loosely based on the artist: The Schiele Slaughters.
Book cover, Alessandra Comini, The Schiele Slaughters. Sunstone Press, 2015.
The following year, in 2016, Comini decided to base her mystery, The Kollwitz Calamities, on the life and work of a woman artist, German Expressionist Käthe Kollwitz.
Book cover, Alessandra Comini, The Kollwitz Calamities. Sunstone Press, 2016.
The Kokoschka Capers illustrates how the infamous Oskar Kokoschka was not as “OK” as his initials suggested. Although the novel features a male artist, his lover, the infamous Alma Mahler, plays an important part.
Book cover, Alessandra Comini, The Kokoschka Capers. Sunstone Press, 2015
Comini’s delightful and informative autobiography, aptly titled In Passionate Pursuit, helps explain why and how this extraordinary woman, scholar, and creator developed and flourished.
Book cover, Alessandra Comini, In Passionate Pursuit: a Memoir, Sunstone Press, 2016.
Her memoir illustrates how all historians, but especially art historians who so love minutiae, are actually detectives. Indeed, Comini is not the only one who has spent her later years writing mysteries. (For example, art historian and curator Helen A. Harrison has authored several murder mysteries.) In this autobiography, Comini includes discussions of many fascinating women, among them Rosa Bonheur, Alma Mahler, Eleonora Duse, and Käthe Kollwitz. Comini has spent much of her life traveling widely in search of known and unknown artists, the majority of them women.
On a personal level, I continue to be astonished about the degree to which my own life correlates with that of Alessandra Comini.
Like me, her first love was ballet. Alexandra Danilova visited Comini’s house in Texas. (I got to meet Danilova, and take a class with her as a youngster).
Both Comini and I have sung and played music our whole lives. Antal Dorati, conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, visited the Comini house. I sang under Dorati in Stockholm.
Cominia and I both did volunteer work in a hospital.
She adores Glenn Gould and Elvis Presley—and so do I.
She played anagrams with her mother. My mother and I enjoyed anagrams too – until Scrabble came around, and we played that incessantly.
She mentions the effects the death of Albert Einstein, and the play The Diary of Anne Frank, had on her. I used to worry about what would happen to the world when Einstein died; and I wrote a diary inspired by Anne Frank.
We both did graduate work in Europe. She adored and still adores languages, accents, and linguistic quirks. So do I.
She became very interested in Scandinavia. I studied there, learned Swedish, and began my dissertation on August Strindberg as artist and art critic (she mentions in her book both Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman, two of my own obsessions).
She loved and collected folk music and played the guitar and other instruments. So did I.
Two things that Comini wrote stand out especially to me:
First: Political upheavals affected her strongly, but “music was the constant that sustained and connected the chapters.” Indeed, when she came across a self-portrait of the artist Angelica Kauffmann, Hesitating between the Arts of Music and Painting, she recognized her own dilemma – as did I.
Self Portrait, the Artist Hesitating Between the Arts of Music and Painting,
Angelica Kauffman, Nostell Priory, Nostell UK (1791).
Second: Following the dancer Agnes DeMille’s advice, she writes, “Long ago I fashioned a life rule for myself that I dare to pass on to the more idealistic students who come my way. I call it the three Ls – Living, Learning, and Loving, and sometimes I suspect that perhaps my classroom lectures in art history are really just subversive attempts to mold character and pass on one simple truth – that life is so precious, each day of it must be spent living it, learning from it, and loving, loving life, others, and oneself as well.”
I did not know any of this when I studied with Dr. Comini in 1969 at Columbia. In fact, she hadn’t yet lived it and written it. Upon reading her autobiography, I was startled to realize that the classes I took with her were among the first she ever taught, and that she felt quite nervous while teaching. Somehow, even early on, she conveyed many of the ideas she so eloquently expresses in her book.
My own decades-long career teaching art history to musicians, dancers, and actors at Juilliard has been subconsciously informed by Alessandra’s teaching and life experiences. And now that I too have retired, like her, I have new and burning passions to pursue. Thank you, Professor Alessandra Comini.
Poem after poem, Old Stranger unearths moments that shape a woman's life. The poet's eye is unflinching as she sees the past folded into the present. Her body is the ground of deep soul hunger. Her language is music.
Bios
Alessandra Comini is University Distinguished Professor of Art History Emerita at Southern Methodist University in Dallas TX. She received her B. A. degree from Barnard College, her M. A. from the University of California at Berkeley, and her Ph.D. “with distinction” from Columbia University, where she taught for ten years. She has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley; Yale University; served as the Alfred Hodder Resident Humanist at Princeton University; and was named Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at Oxford University‘s European Humanities Research Centre (1996). She received the Distinguished Teaching Prize of the Meadows School of the Arts and the United Methodist Church Scholar/Teacher of the Year Award (1996). The author of major essays, eight scholarly books, and twelve novels, Dr. Comini was awarded the Grand Decoration of Honor by the Republic of Austria in 1990 in recognition of her contributions to Germanic culture. Her lively revisionist work in the history of women artists was acknowledged in 1995 by the Women’s Caucus for Art with the coveted Lifetime Achievement Award.
Greta Berman is Art Editor of Persimmon Tree. She received a B.A. from Antioch College, an M.A. from the University of Stockholm, and a Ph.D. from Columbia. She has recently retired from her position as Professor of Art History at Juilliard, where she taught for 46 years. In addition to writing a monthly column, “Focus on Art,” for the Juilliard Journal, she co-curated and co-edited Synesthesia: Art and the Mind with Carol Steen, at the McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Ontario in 2008. She and Steen also published a chapter titled “Synesthesia and the Artistic Process” for the Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia (Oxford University Press, 2013). She has published numerous articles, as well as lectured on synesthesia, and other subjects.
This was very interesting. Many thanks.